Indonesia dumps plan for high-speed rail

NO BULLET TRAINA train loaded with passengers arrives at the Tebet station in Jakarta during rush hour in this file photo. The Indonesian government has dumped a plan to construct the country’s first high-speed rail line, a surprise disappointment to Japan and China, who had been competing to build the project.AFP PHOTO

JAKARTA: Indonesia has unexpectedly dumped much-vaunted plans for its first high-speed railway in favor of a slower and cheaper rail option, in a blow to Japan and China who have been fiercely competing to win the construction job.

President Joko Widodo was expected to announce the winning bid for the multi-billion dollar infrastructure project this week, but instead his chief economics minister, Darmin Nasution, told the Japanese ambassador Friday that the hotly contested project had been shelved.

The two Asian powerhouses had been locked in a contest for months to build the railway, a line connecting the sprawling capital Jakarta with the mountain-fringed city of Bandung about 160 kilometers away.

“Both proposals extended by our government and the Chinese government are not accepted,” Japanese ambassador Tanizaki Yasuaki told reporters Friday.

Nasution said he would deliver the same news to Chinese ambassador Xie Feng later in the afternoon.

Widodo had commissioned an independent review into the high-speed rail line, which if completed would not only have slashed travel time between Jakarta and Bandung but paved the way for an expanded network linking the capital with Indonesia’s second-largest city Surabaya in East Java.